A Ferry Loop Plan To Connect the Dots For New York Bay

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: February 10, 2001

From Boston to Seattle to San Diego, maritime cities across the country have embraced ferries as an inexpensive and people-pleasing way to ease congestion, spur waterfront revitalization and stitch together far-flung communities snubbed by other forms of mass transit.

Now a coalition of ferry advocates in New York and New Jersey has quietly put together a proposal for an ambitious, 25-stop ferry loop for Upper New York Bay, one that would link Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and New Jersey with a fleet of 99-passenger vessels.

In the proposal it will make public next week, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a year-old civic and planning organization set up to promote waterfront recreation and economic development projects, maps out a ferry loop crisscrossing New York Harbor. The plan seeks to revive the glory days of trans-harbor travel, when 112 steamer and ferry routes traversed the upper and lower bay, linking towns and cities from Coney Island to the Jersey Shore.

The plan depends on a private operator's willingness to run it, and almost certainly on some public subsidy to start and perhaps to maintain it. Neither is assured, and there is no guarantee the plan will ever come to fruition. But similar operations have sprouted around the country in recent years. And in a region where it can take two hours to reach Jersey City from Red Hook, Brooklyn -- places separated by just three miles of water -- the plan offers the hope of saving travel time, increasing cross-harbor commerce, and opening job opportunities for people across the region. Beyond that, its promoters have a loftier goal: to inspire local officials to think of their shared waterway as a freeway that unites communities, not a watery void that sets them apart.

''In looking around the harbor, we saw this extraordinary collection of parks, cultural institutions and commercial nodes virtually unreachable from one another,'' said Carter Craft, project director of the alliance. ''We have a free highway right on our doorstep but until now, it's been largely abandoned.''

The group envisions a privately run system of eight boats that would make 25 stops around Upper New York Bay. Launching every 20 minutes on weekdays and using Battery Park and the World Financial Center as end points, the $18.5 million service would move clockwise and counterclockwise around the harbor and connect mid-route with the Staten Island Ferry, which would serve as an express run to Lower Manhattan. The average ride between stops would be about seven minutes. The one-way fare would be $3.

Supporters of the idea, including the National Park Service, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Howard Golden, the Brooklyn borough president, say a comprehensive ferry system would help to revitalize vacant waterfront property, reduce the dependency on private cars and lure tourists to attractions that are, for now, largely inaccessible by public transportation.

Private ferry operators said they welcomed the idea but expressed caution, saying public subsidies might be required to sustain the loop in its early years. ''It's very forward thinking and perhaps a bit rosy in its projections but then again transportation professionals thought we were crazy when we started up 15 years ago,'' said Arthur Imperatore Jr., president of New York Waterway, whose nine Hudson and East River routes now carry 32,000 passengers a day, up from 18,000 five years ago.

And recent history gives reason for both optimism and concern. While two dozen ferry routes have begun since 1986, low ridership has forced operators to discontinue more than half of them, including a Queens-to-Midtown Manhattan link that New York Waterway plans to abandon next month and the Delta Air Lines LaGuardia Airport water taxi, which made its last run in December.

Despite obstacles that include a historically tempestuous relationship between New York and New Jersey, the plan's boosters say there is an untapped market for nautical transit. According to their projections, the system, which would cost $5 million a year to operate, could be up and running in a year. Local transportation agencies, they said, could use loans from the federal Department of Transportation to buy boats, which would then be leased to private operators. Many of the 15 landings that do not yet exist would be created with floating barges, at a cost of $5 million.

''This is not like building a Second Avenue subway,'' Mr. Craft said.

Ultimately, he and others say, the service could carry as many as 12,000 passengers a day. Ideally, they said, ferry travel would become part of a regional fare-collection system, similar to E-ZPass, that would allow easy transfers among boats, buses, trains and subways.

The harbor loop seeks to capitalize on the growing popularity of ferries in both New York and in coastal cities around the world. In addition to the Staten Island Ferry, which transports 63,000 people a day, five private ferry operators carry passengers in the metropolitan area. In 1985, there were none.